Sage writing advice from Edward P. Jones

Among the crowd of foreign and local literary luminaries that graced this year’s Manila International Literary Festival was Edward P. Jones, the writer whose novel The Known World, arguably his most famous work, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2004.

The quiet man had a cool, straightforward manner that instantly called to mind his prose, which is all at once stark, direct, and powerful. Journalist Ruel de Vera had the honor of introducing and interviewing Jones, who even in his coolness had the audience’s full, undivided attention the moment he began to speak.

 

Jones was born in Washington DC and raised by his mother, a dishwasher. He started writing when he was a college student at the College of the Holy Cross, where he earned his English degree. Later, he earned an MFA from the University of Virginia. Before he wrote The Known World, he worked a rather unglamorous job writing summaries of tax-related articles for a journal.

 

Interestingly enough, even with an extensive literary education (including the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship from the MacArthur Foundation, one of the largest private foundations in the US), he still swears by the simple act of reading, which he said is enough for any young writer to improve his craft: “You have libraries, and if you can afford it, bookstores. That’s all you need…the more books you read, the more stories you read, the more you get a sense of what’s good and what’s not good.”

 

As expected, reading is something that Jones does a lot of in his free time. He also likes watching movies, and even managed to catch Loy Arcenas’ “Niño” while he was here. In the strictest sense of the term though, “free time” is nonexistent for this author, whose process involves constantly writing stories in his head. Creating the story and the characters that populate The Known World became almost involuntary for Jones, who wrote the story in his head and managed to hold it there for 10 long years while going about his daily routines.

“People who don’t write see writing as just tapping away at keys, but working something out in your head is just a part of writing as the physical act,” shared Jones, who said that by the time he sat down to actually set The Known World to paper he knew his characters and their world so well, it only took him three months to finish the first draft.

 

The fact that he’s been working the story out only in his head for 10 years is astounding if only for the novel’s rich, detailed landscape and the complexity of its characters. When asked if he had to do a lot of research to write the novel, Jones admitted that he, surprisingly, didn’t. “Research is fine, but it is sometimes overrated. If you can’t know the character yourself, all the books you read won’t help you.”

 

Indeed, writing appears to be second nature to Jones, but more than that, Jones said that writing is “that one thing that can get [him] from one day to another…it makes the rest of the day so much more bearable…it’s like medicine.” –KG, GMA News